The Mortgage Crisis

A letter in response to John Cassidy’s article (February 4, 2008)

John Cassidy’s criticism of Alan Greenspan for keeping interest rates low during the period preceding the mortgage crash seems misplaced (The Talk of the Town, February 4th). The primary job of the Federal Reserve is to pour money, effectively via interest rates, into the growing economy; to “feed” the economy so that it can grow, but at a rate that does not lead to inflation. Greenspan achieved that. It is not the job of the Fed to micromanage the market—that’s the job of state and federal regulatory agencies. If there is someone to blame in this crisis, it is four groups of people: the C.E.O.s of mortgage lenders that engaged in predatory practices, the corporations that bought the resulting bonds without researching them properly, the government regulatory agencies asleep at the wheel, and the people who signed up for those mortgages without skeptical analysis of what they could truly afford.

Peter Miller

Glendale, Calif.

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